Oh, we have a spring-specific holiday; one of the names of Passover is Chag ha-Aviv, the Festival of Spring. (This is why every so often we have a leap year, in which there are two months of Adar -- the month before Nisan, of which Passover is the 15th -- in order to prevent Passover from coming while it's still winter.)
But it's not about a triumph. There's no victory in the coming of spring; there's no sense that there has been a struggle, that winter seeks to remain dominant and that spring has to fight to be reborn. And -- I wouldn't say this if you hadn't already, but really, that concept of the turning of the year is pagan, and we didn't adopt it even to that extent.
Passover is about our birth as a nation, and about how God redeemed us from slavery ... and in a big way it's about God's total mastery over nature, and over the powers that the Egyptians worshipped as divine. The Resurrection story layers very well with the pagan rebirth-of-spring theme; the Exodus story kind of contradicts it.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2008-03-23 08:14 pm (UTC)But it's not about a triumph. There's no victory in the coming of spring; there's no sense that there has been a struggle, that winter seeks to remain dominant and that spring has to fight to be reborn. And -- I wouldn't say this if you hadn't already, but really, that concept of the turning of the year is pagan, and we didn't adopt it even to that extent.
Passover is about our birth as a nation, and about how God redeemed us from slavery ... and in a big way it's about God's total mastery over nature, and over the powers that the Egyptians worshipped as divine. The Resurrection story layers very well with the pagan rebirth-of-spring theme; the Exodus story kind of contradicts it.